Midnight Hour
by Becchan
Summary: [Tsusoka] On Samhain, the worlds of the dead and the living are closer than ever... and some restless souls want to leave their burdens on the living. But there's someone in the middle. [Rated for melodrama and morbidity]


**Title:** Midnight Hour  
**Fandom:** Yami no Matsuei *shokku!*  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Characters:** Tsuzuki and Hisoka  
**Notes:** Fic for Halloween! The rating is purely because of the crazy melodrama and morbidity. Read, and be amazed at the number of times I can use the word "anguish" in one fic.  
  
Many, many thanks to my darling Lys, who convinced me that this wasn't a piece of crap and for helping me with conquering the initial writer's block I had. Lys, you rock. Even though you're really biased. 3  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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All Hallows' Eve.  
  
Maybe it was the name that made the night seem so dark. The moonless sky pressed down like velvet, covering and consuming even the dim lights from flickering street lamps and waning jack-o'-lanterns. It was suffocating; it muffled the world in its folds until the only thing that could be heard was the wind - a breeze that would have seemed more gentle and less chilling on any night less haunted. It whispered in the trees, softly whistling the secret songs of restless souls... If one listened too closely, it spoke of such despair and abandonment as to drive the listener to morbid hallucination, for the living mind will never comprehend the argot of the dead.  
  
In the midnight hour, when the light voices of children had long been silent and the sky was tucked more tightly over the horizon - when any soul walking alone could taste on his own breath the gravity in the air - then was when the dead sang the loudest.   
  
  
_Tsuzuki understood it well - the language of the dead. From a hiss of anger to a shriek of anguish, very few of the silent pleas for peace escaped his ears. Especially on Samhain._  
  
  
By morning, it would be called jest, drollery fabricated by the ambiance of the evening; benighted mirth and disbelief would slice the once-reverant atmosphere and the air would pour back in so one could choke on the oxygen. Visions and phantasms of death and blood and pain held no meaning after the midnight hour passed - no meaning save to those they consumed, captured, and those whose souls they ripped away and restored haphazardly before winging back to the shadows whence they came to stir and simmer for the rest of eternity.  
  
  
_Some souls - even those retrieved by the Shinigami, sent on to rest - some souls could never be placated. Some had endured such anguish and disappointment, lived in such vivid nightmares that death itself could not calm their sorrows and angers. They cried, they wailed for their pain to be assuaged, never content with the eternity they were doomed to spend restless and unfulfilled.  
  
Tsuzuki ached, seeing such helpless dysphoria; always in his mind it haunted him, mocking - That should be you. That should be you._  
  
  
Except to those whom the apparitions taunted; to them, the song of the dead was nameless horror who besought their hearts, thirsted for their blood to wet throats long rotted in their strife to intone their endless dirge - haunted minds stumbled blindly through the night, scratching and clawing to be free of the nightmare that held them captive. Bony hands crawled on their skin, sometimes real and sometimes just the figment of a culpable conscience, but the withered fingers gripped and tore and purloined innocence to use as balm for a tormented, restless soul.  
  
  
_But now it was not the lamentations of the souls passed on that haunted Tsuzuki's mind, nor was it his own grief, wrapped and buried under layers and layers of facades and smiles. The silent howl that anguished in his mind was more bitter, more raw, and somehow more real... Horrible images flashed through his head, leaving crude threads of blood and pain, anguish and desperation.  
  
Hisoka. It was Hisoka._  
  
  
Samhain - this is the time when the dead are closest to the living. The foggy veil that separated the afterlife from the realm of the living becomes a mere wire, deadly thin and hardly discernible. It could easily tear the flesh of one who tried, naively, to cross it, but emotions and visions flit across unfettered, and so the bottled grief of those trapped spirits flooded across the night. It ravaged, desecrated in a blind search for solace.  
  
But it does not find it, for at cockcrow the souls are collared back to their tormented afterlife, not soothed by human happiness, but stricken with the fear and horror of the minds they afflicted.  
  
  
_Tsuzuki cursed the gods of fate, trying in vain to quell his anger and distress. He would not add to the torrent of emotion that agonized Hisoka! It had struck him like a blow between the eyes; what he heard just as the language of the dead would steal away the world and existence of an empath - especially one who was not used to Samhain as a dead soul. It would overwhelm him, cascade across his mind like a rushing waterfall, washing away all semblance of actuality until it scraped away his soul.  
  
They were dead, but not - wisps of being that existed on that razor-thin wire between life and death - and just as the rage of distraught souls surrounded them, the terror of the living world washed across them like ice.  
_  
  
The fear is overwhelming. Only an innocent mind being raped and defiled by the violent retribution of an incited spirit can create the morbid, impelling horror that charges the midnight hour; only the panic and abhorrence of a living soul being ripped apart can clutch the heart, squeezing - squeezing - until blood runs cold on tepid flesh and eyes stare, blank with terrible comprehension, into a world that will never be clean.  
  
_  
He's only a room away, but the anguished dirge of the dead fills the air to suffocation and it feels like an eternity before Tsuzuki can reach his partner's bedside. It's like swimming through a swamp - he can't see, can't hear as he fights his way toward Hisoka and the terrifying emotions projecting from the empath. Finally, he falls babbling to his knees by the boy's bed, saying, "Hisoka, Hisoka, I'm here."_  
  
  
The fear is overwhelming and the emotional assault is indiscriminatory, claiming the unguarded minds of the innocently sleeping and the wary who do not slumber. It is the curse of those sensitive to emotion to be assailed most violently, being barbed with painful nuances of trepidation and hatred that cannot filter into other minds. Their souls scream under the onslaught, bleeding terror to the night - scarring so deeply so that not even the hopeful light of dawn can heal them.  
  
_  
The sheets are twisted violently around the boy's thin frame, soaked through with sweat and clutched tightly in white-knuckled hands. Hisoka is shaking fiercely, shivering in the onslaught of fear and anger. Over and over, horrible images are projected into Tsuzuki's mind, nightmarish phantasms from a soul ripped open to bring to surface memories so anguished and painful and so long buried -  
_  
  
Bony fingers clutch at throats,  
  
_- blood on the flower petals, in my eyes, everywhere - _  
  
bile rises, choking and gurgling and gagging,  
  
_- the pain, ripping me apart - _  
  
nails dig into flesh, clawing and tearing,  
  
_- I'm going to die -_  
  
and they plead and beg and pray  
  
_- just let me die -_  
  
for everything to end.  
  
  
_And somehow Tsuzuki's hands found Hisoka's face to wipe away the tears, they found his shoulders and drew him close, stilling the shakes and sobs against his chest and burying his face in that sweaty blonde hair to whisper "I'm here, I'm here" over again, a desperate mantra.  
  
_  
When the sun finally peeks over the horizon, the night slips away and the world is left with the mere memory of a nightmare. The few souls so broken as to remember their terror ferment in quiet seclusion; they hide away, twisting deeper and deeper into themselves with only the haunting thoughts of fear and anger and vengeance - they are condemned, damned to their private anguish, so far gone that they do not even search for salvation.  
  
  
_Green eyes snapped open, unfocusing and wild and the first thing Hisoka did was twist wildly in Tsuzuki's grasp, almost forcing the man away by the sheer power of the panic he emitted. But Tsuzuki held on, still whispering his mantra to drown out the overwhelming dirge - when Hisoka heard it, he went limp in the embrace, his fingers hooked loosely in Tsuzuki's shirt, and he gave a shuddering sob.  
  
"Shhh," Tsuzuki said. "I'm here."  
_  
  
Only a soul who has descended, been lost and twisted and burned in the fires of hell - only a soul who has fought back through the ragged debris of a shattered mind to freedom - only this soul can pull another soul that has been so ravaged and broken from the depths of despair to live for life again.  
_  
  
Hisoka's breath was hot on his neck, and his voice shook terribly. His arms tightened around his partner's body.   
  
"So am I."  
  
  
  
  
  
_


End file.
